


Birds of a Feather

by MusicPrincess655



Series: Soulmate AU [5]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 10:31:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13292946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MusicPrincess655/pseuds/MusicPrincess655
Summary: Semi doesn't know who his soulmate mark belongs to, but he might have an idea





	Birds of a Feather

**Author's Note:**

> Hi guys! I recently hit 500 followers on Tumblr. For the new people, this means I add to my soulmate au. I've done SemiShira's story this time because they kind of became my Brand this year.

_Swans._

When Eita was younger, he’d assumed the swan feather on his right forearm would make his soulmate easy to find. He’d imagined girls with elegant features and queenly faces, boys with regal and princely bearings. Whatever gender his soulmate was, Eita had no doubt they would have a personality and appearance worthy of royalty.

Who else could be represented by a swan feather?

It had taken him almost a month of high school before he’d realized that his mark could apply to almost _anyone._ Shiratori. Swans.

He was a dumbass.

And okay, it couldn’t refer to just _anyone._ Since he’d made the horrifying realization that his mark was a feather from his school’s unofficial mascot, he’d been methodically going through people, trying to weed everyone out until he found the person he belonged to.

Satori was out – and thank _God,_ because while Eita loved Satori like a brother, he was just that. Like a brother. Eita couldn’t imagine being his romantic soulmate. He’d considered the possibility that they were platonic soulmates – much less common, but not unheard of – until Satori had seen Wakatoshi’s left hand. Besides the fact that three-way soulmate bonds were even less common than platonic ones, Satori and Wakatoshi’s marks matched each other perfectly and his not at all.

Reon was out for a similar reason. He’d found his soulmate in childhood, a small girl named Ai. While Eita liked them both – especially Ai, who despite her plain face was the life of the party – they very clearly didn’t match with him.

And on and on it went. Even though the wrist was the most common place for soulmate marks, about half the team had marks in different places, and the ones that didn’t also didn’t really match him. And of course, that was just the team. There were a lot of students at Shiratorizawa that Eita had never met.

So here he was, stuck mulling over every person in his school, staring at a pond that would at least partially freeze when winter fully set in. Maybe he’d been right the first time. Maybe his soulmate was a prince or princess that he’d meet after he graduated. Only about 50% of people met their soulmates by the end of high school, and he was in the winter of his third year.

“This is stupid,” he muttered to himself. He’d heard it a thousand times. No one found their soulmate because they were looking. Soulmates always found each other when they least expected it.

But how was he supposed to avoid looking when there was a good chance his soulmate was somewhere around him?

“Oi! Eita!”

Satori was waving from where he and Wakatoshi were perched on the bank of the pond. Once, Eita would have been reluctant to join them. They’d been completely absorbed in each other when they’d first started dating. But now that the honeymoon phase had worn off, Eita didn’t feel like a third wheel hanging out with them anymore.

“What are you two doing out?” Eita asked. “Isn’t it a little cold for a park date?”

“Coats exist,” Satori shrugged. “Besides, the swans only come here in the winter.”

Eita looked back at the pond to see that yes, there were the big white birds that had been haunting his thoughts on the edge of the pond. He sat down almost ruefully, looking at them along with Satori and Wakatoshi.

They really were beautiful. The way they slid around the water slowly was like poetry in motion. Even Eita could put aside his associations with them to enjoy how pretty they were.

“Nasty little fuckers,” Satori commented. “I love seeing them, but I know to keep my distance now.”

“What?” Eita asked. “What do you mean?”

An expression that Eita didn’t recognize passed over Satori’s face, and it took Eita a moment to place it as embarrassment. In the time he’d known Satori, he hadn’t realized his best friend felt enough shame to feel embarrassment.

“One of them went after him in our first year,” Wakatoshi cut in. “It was quite an experience.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” Satori complained. “I just wanted a closer look. I never expected it to bite me.”

“You should’ve known better than to try and touch a swan.”

“I do now!”

“Wait,” Eita interrupted, because once the two of them got started, it was impossible to get their attention anywhere else. He’d never understood how Satori could hold such long conversations with Wakatoshi. Even being friends with both of them, Eita had never been able to draw Wakatoshi into a conversation with more than the necessary information being exchanged. “Swans are mean?”

“They’re territorial, which I know _now,_ ” Satori said, with a look thrown Wakatoshi’s direction. “They go after anyone who gets too close pretty aggressively, which no one bothered to tell me until one bit me on the arm.”

“I thought you would know better,” Wakatoshi said blankly, which might have been genuine and might have been Wakatoshi being amused at his boyfriend’s misfortune. Eita had never been great at telling the difference.

“I didn’t know they were aggressive,” Eita said, trying to bring them back to topic.

“Like I said, nasty little fuckers,” Satori said. “They’re pretty to look at, but get too close and you’ll get snapped at.”

Eita froze, his eyes still tracing the movements of the swans closest to him. He knew someone who fit that description perfectly.

He’d always kept an eye on Shirabu since the younger setter was prone to hyperfixating until he hurt himself, but with this new information, he looked closer. He knew Shirabu had a soulmate mark on his left forearm, but he’d never known what it was. Shirabu was weirdly protective of it, never showing it when asked. Besides knowing it took up most of his forearm by the sleeves Shirabu sometimes wore to hide it, Eita knew almost nothing about it.

But now that Eita was paying attention, he could see what he’d missed for two years. Shirabu always wore his blazer or a long-sleeved uniform shirt, but he never covered his arms during practice, rightly assuming that everyone would be more focused on the ball than his soulmate mark. Especially when he was practicing setting, arms poised and turned out to the world, Eita had a good look at his mark.

It was a feather, although Eita could never get a close enough to say what bird it belonged to. All he could really see was that it was about the same size as his, and a little darker.

For the first time, Eita started to consider that his mark might be for Shirabu. It wasn’t that he’d never thought Shirabu was pretty or been attracted to him. It was more his surety that Shirabu would never return the feelings. Shirabu was prickly with everyone – even Kawanishi, who was supposedly his best friend – but he seemed to have a particular aversion to Eita. Eita had always assumed it was their clashing personalities, but maybe there was something else behind it.

So for now, Eita waited and watched. He caught all the glimpses of Shirabu’s mark that he could during practice, and while no one could really tell that marks matched until they were laid side by side, Eita started to think he could recognize something of Shirabu’s mark in his own.

And then practice was over forever for Eita, snuffed out by a nobody team that had risen from their own ashes.

Eita didn’t see much of Shirabu after that.

It wasn’t just that they were avoiding each other. In fact, Eita was looking for Shirabu more than ever with the deadline hanging over his head. However, he had his own problems to deal with. He’d never thought of himself as someone who’d go to university, but one had extended an offer of a volleyball scholarship. It wasn’t anything that would let him go pro, but it would pay for university, and he’d get to play again. It wasn’t an opportunity he was going to give up.

But he still had to pass his final exams if he wanted to keep it, so he spent all of the free time that had once belonged to volleyball on studying. He stared at his books until he went cross eyed, and didn’t spare any time on vanishing younger setters.

Until he was at his graduation ceremony, final exams passed, university scholarship clinched, and no closer to figuring out if Shirabu was really what Eita thought he was.

It wasn’t the end of the world that he hadn’t figured everything out with Shirabu. He had Shirabu’s LINE ID, and they’d even exchanged a few polite messages before, although all relating to volleyball. It wasn’t like he couldn’t keep in touch, even if he wasn’t at the same school anymore.

A spring of _something_ that felt alarmingly like nostalgia welled in Eita’s chest. Despite the struggles, the losses, the pain, he’d had a good three years. He was going to miss Shiratorizawa.

And then he saw the person who’d been haunting his thoughts for months.

Shirabu didn’t look like he was running away anymore. His eyes were set and determined on Eita’s face. It couldn’t have been more obvious that he was waiting for Eita to come to him.

“Take care of yourself,” Eita said, because it seemed like the kind of thing to say when he was more or less saying goodbye. “Keep practicing with Goshiki. I know he annoys you sometimes, but he’s going to be the next ace, and you have to work as well with him as you did with Wakatoshi.”

“I don’t want to talk about Goshiki right now,” Shirabu said. It was time to settle things once and for all.

“Show me your soulmate mark,” Eita said. It wasn’t a question, but Shirabu was perfectly free to leave if he didn’t want to. Eita fully expected him to.

Instead, Shirabu shrugged out of his blazer and rolled up his left sleeve, holding out his arm for Eita to see. Eita held his wrist, turning his arm to see it. A grey and white feather took up most of Shirabu’s forearm.

“I thought it was for Ushijima at first,” Shirabu said, refusing to meet Eita’s eyes. “I saw him my last year in middle school, and…well. An eagle seemed to fit perfectly.”

Eita could understand why Shirabu had jumped to Wakatoshi as a possible match for his mark. He also knew that by the time Shirabu had seen Wakatoshi, he and Satori had already found each other.

“So you’ve been hiding it for years because…?” Eita asked. He resisted the urge to lay his arm alongside Shirabu’s to see if they matched.

“I wanted more time,” Shirabu said. “I was wrong about it being for Ushijima, and then I…I think I figured out who it was really for. And I wanted more time to figure out how I felt about that before they knew and expected things from me I wasn’t ready to give.”

“You figured all that out on your own?” Eita asked. He’d never been in doubt about Shirabu’s intelligence, but he also knew how limited it was when it came to Shirabu himself.

“Taichi helped,” Shirabu said, looking angry about it. “He’s the one who figured out who this belongs to in the first place, and he’s been nothing but smug about it since.”

Eita took that as his cue to roll up his own sleeve and compare his arm to Shirabu’s.

Their marks weren’t the same – in many ways, they were very different people. But the marks matched, in a way that Eita couldn’t articulate no matter how hard he tried. Something about the lines, the slopes of the feathers, made it clear that though they came from different species they very much belonged together.

“So what now?” Shirabu asked. Eita wondered if he’d been feeling the deadline hanging over him as keenly as Eita had and just dealt with it in the opposite way.

“Well, first of all, you better answer my messages,” Eita said. “No leaving me on read for weeks. I know you have LINE and I know you know how to use it. Keep in touch.”

Shirabu blinked.

“You don’t mind that it’s me?” he asked. “I thought you didn’t like me.”

“That’s not true,” Eita told him. “You’re a pain in my ass sometimes, but I’ve never disliked you.”

He ruffled Shirabu’s hair just to see him wrinkle his nose when his stupid ruler bangs got messed up.

“You mean it?” Shirabu asked, fixing his hair with his free hand. “You’re okay that we’re soulmates?”

Eita raised Shirabu’s arm to his face so he could kiss the mark.

“I could do a lot worse.”

There was a smile tugging at the corners of Shirabu’s mouth that he couldn’t seem to quite get a handle on. Eita felt an answering one rise on his own face.

**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr: [ musicprincess655 ](http://musicprincess655.tumblr.com)
> 
> So because of some Very Bad Life Shit, I'll be going on indefinite hiatus. I'll leave commissions open, but until I get some semblance of control over my life, I will probably not be updating anything else. For those of you who follow my magic au, I will most likely not be starting that anytime soon. Thank you all for your support.


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